The world of social networking services has seen various services rise rapidly and then move out of the way as new services come into play.

A quick non-comprehensive review:
+ Friendster to
+ Orkut to
+ LinkedIn and MySpace
and now, the MASSIVE popularity of Facebook.

However, as the WSJ reports, privacy concerns are causing concern for some Facebook users. Worth mentioning is that Facebook has a massive amount of tools to make info private or available only to friends. In other words, in many cases you can decide who sees what info you choose. Yahoo’s MyWeb was doing this a couple of years ago (it continues today).

However, could getting all of this configured properly be too complex for some users? This is mentioned in the article. We would argue that some users might not even know what is being done.

From the WSJ:

Some users of the Facebook Inc. Web site have been startled by a new feature that tracks their activity outside of the site and shows it to their friends — renewing questions about the privacy implications of a growing practice of exploiting personal information in online advertising…For instance, a user who logs on to Facebook might see an update in a section of the site called the “news feed” noting the movie a friend rented from an online site, along with a photo of that friend and a movie-rental ad…Users can’t opt out of the program, called “Facebook Beacon,” altogether. Instead, they have to opt out on a case-by-case basis when they use one of the outside sites.

The article includes comments on the system from Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer at Facebook.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under Social Media, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.